Why should you care about Social Media?

is changing. The means of how people or businesses are sharing information is shifting . Prior to open source, online users interacted with HTMLcontent on one page. Now, open source allows information and communicationto be fluid, user-generated and viral. Just about anything can be “shared” onother sites or forwarded in a viral manner using tools like Share This, AddThis,ReTweets or various other sharing functions. Because of the highly viral natureof the Internet, it’s imperative for personal as well as corporate brands to managethemselves consistently and “real time” using social media.

Now here are 10 tips of 100 but I want you to retain them so lets do it over many weeks. Installment 1/10

Create Your Brand

Create a brand but more importantly, understand YOUR brand. Theavatar and screen name is your company/personal name. Treat youravatar like a logo. Use the same image consistently across all socialmedia sites because you never know where it’ll show up. That littlephoto is what your audience will associate with your brand.Using your personal name as a screen name works well, if it is easyto remember. Like a logo, your screen name is like a company name.Choose a screen name that isn’t confusing or hard to remember. Forpersonal brands, use your own name if possible, and use it consistently.This is the brand: YOU.

If using your personal name doesn’t work either due to privacy orit’s already taken, try to keep your screen name short so it’s easy toremember and so it doesn’t use up precious characters on sites likeTwitter. Your brand name will start to appear repetitively next to youravatar, but also as vanity URL’s, like Facebook.com/yourbrand orLinkedIn.com/in/yourbrand.

Brand Repetition = Brand Equity

The more a “logo” is seen across multiple social portals, the moreit becomes imprinted in the subconscious of the brand’s audience.Social Media will put your visual brand out there thousands of times.Consistency allows brands to have more online velocity.For example, Susan Boyle went from being an unknown singer to aworldwide phenomenon in less than a week due in large part to hername and visual image repeated over and over on social sites. Thephoto of her standing in a beige frock with the bright blue Britain’s“Got Talent” background served as her brand identity.

How to Build Influence

If influence in social media were a mathematical equation, it wouldlook like this:Influence = Reach*(Brand x Expertise x Trust)*reach is a multiplier of influenceMany of the tips listed in this book will help your brand buildinfluence if followed and applied consistently. We live in a time whenan individual can have as much leverage or influence as an entirecorporation through social media channels.Pick three to five subjects you like to talk about consistently. You don’thave to be an expert, but be passionate enough about the topics so youenjoy talking about them every day. Be consistent with your brandvoice. Eventually, people will begin to see you as an influencer andexpert in a certain category or industry. They’ll identify with YOUand begin conversations with YOU. This is the key to social mediatraction.

Broadcasting vs. Engaging

Talk with people online, not at them. The concept of inboundmarketing versus outbound marketing was introduced by Hubspot.com. Traditional advertising channels like television, print media andbillboards have the ability to get in front of a large audience, but is thataudience paying attention? Chances are they’re tuned out because theyaren’t given a choice on whether they want to hear brand messaging.Engaging an audience on a personal level through direct conversationon social portals is more powerful because the audience opts in to yourmessage. Their opting in to what you have to say is the beginning ofyour relationship, and without trust, relationships don’t succeed.This is one of the most important tips to understand when building asuccessful brand using social media. Studies suggest consumers trusttheir peer recommendations 78% of the time versus 14% for traditionaladvertising

Be Consistent

Using your “logo” and brand name over time will build brand equity.Change it, and your brand takes a step backwards. It’s disorienting foran audience who has learned to identify with your brand out of thesea of other brands online. Consistency is critical because the velocitywith which it’ll move across the Internet and mobile devices is mindboggling and getting faster as your brand equity increases.Moreover, social sites will come and go over time but your brandimage will still remain similar over time. Diligence in preservingbrand consistency and equity is important across social networks aswell as over time.If you remember one tip from this book, this one is it. I can’t emphasizeenough the importance of being consistent with how your brandlooks and sounds. The open source nature of today’s internet make itpossible for your brand to reach places you never expected or knowabout unless you’re monitoring it.

Manage Expectations

Social Media creates a direct line of communication between yourbrand and your audience. You wouldn’t normally pick up the phoneand call Ashton Kutcher to see what he’s been up to, but you can sendhim a message directly on Twitter or Facebook. It appears there is adirect line of communication but the level of expectation needs to berealistic. There is an expectation that one person has an immediateconnection with another and thus immediate response. However, arelationship must first be nurtured before it can be beneficial.For brands, social media offers a direct line of communication with atargeted audience. It’s an opportunity to provide one-on-one interactionand nurture the trust level and maintain the inbound marketingconnection.

Be a Conduit of Useful InformationB

Once a connection has been created between a brand and its audience,that connection grows through the consistent process of sharing content.Whether content is originated from you or shared from another source,brand equity grows by providing information that is relevant and useful tothe audience. You’re keeping them engaged.In fact, it’s not a bad idea to create original content and share otherpeople’s content equally. One of the tips to a successful social mediastrategy in this ebook talks about supporting others through retweetsand content sharing. By serving as a conduit, your brand gainscredibility as a resource for useful information.My brand was built around wine, food, branding and bacon. I’ve beena conduit of daily information about these subjects. People know thatI’m going to talk about any one of these things, which created a levelof expectation. They expect me to talk about wine, and because I do,my brand has an established level of trust

Don’t be a Spammer

Sharing ways to work from home, make thousands of dollars or showingpeople how to lose a bunch of weight is spammy. From television toemail to social media, there are people out there who insist on tryingthe same method of promoting get rich quick schemes over and over.If engaging people online is your goal, these tactics will produce thecomplete opposite effect and turn the audience off.Spam in social media is the opposite of trust. It usually appears afteryou’ve opted in to someone else either by following them on Twitteror becoming a fan of their Facebook page. Instead of beginning arelationship, they look at is an opportunity to send out a blanket offerof some sort hoping some percentage of people click their link. That’sthe old way of doing things—it’s outbound marketing.

Avoid Spam Campaigns

Your brand will NOT grow if you try to add someone to your TwitterMafia via direct message, or with “I just gave you good luck” messages.These types of spam are not human interaction. They’re a turnoff thattaints the experience of sites like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter

Social media makes it easy for people to connect and share information.Just about everyone has their own projects and interests in the hopper.Look for opportunities to “pollinate” other projects. It doesn’t takemuch effort. You might have the one skill, the one connection or theone piece of information to accelerate someone else’s efforts.Cross-pollinating via social media is even easier than in physicalrelationships and you can do more of it.We live in a ‘thank you’ economy now where trust and relationshipbuilding comes with some basic manners like “please” and “thankyou”. Every interaction you make is visible to the rest of the world,which means unselfish support of other people, including competitors,gives your brand a positive glow that isn’t measurable, but it’s there.I learned early on that the more I pollinated other people’s efforts,the faster my brand grew. Self-promotion has a little better than a 1:1return for your brand, but promoting other projects has about a 2:1return for your brand.

That is all for now I will do the next 10 in a few days. Hope this helps you.

Justin Matthew comfortable living off the internet.

Our company will blast your brand into the next level.
We represent multiple major corporations and they are available for references. [email protected]
www.ownsocialmedia.com
www.monopolizesocialmedia.com
https://www.facebook.com/MonopolizeSocialMedia
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JustinMatthewSocialMedia/posts
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+Monopolizesocialmedia/posts